Follow This Simple 5 Step Guide to Create a Successful Udemy Course

If you’re looking for a platform where you can sell your online courses and grow your own brand and community — Udemy might not be for you.

However, if you’re not looking to build your own online business and just want to know how to sell courses on Udemy, then keep reading to learn everything you need about this platform.

Keep reading to learn more about them in detail.

After choosing a course idea, it’s time to define your target audience.

This will help you set up a learning path for your students and to define your teaching style.

Udemy students are divided into 3 levels:

If your lesson is aimed at beginners, you must keep your course videos simple and you’ll need to explain the purpose behind everything you do.

Also, use terms and language that would be considered easy to read from a school level.

For intermediate or expert students, you can create in-depth courses, because they already have experience in the topic, so they’ll be more likely to understand topic-related terms.

After defining your topic and target audience, you can move on to plan your content’s structure.

Your outline must be divided into 3 sections:

Before creating a “Bonus Lecture” make sure you are following their Rules and Guidelines to prevent suspensions.

Their “Bonus Lecture” rules are:

After planning your course’s structure and ensuring it’ll give a great learning experience, you can start recording your Udemy course.

As an instructor, you’ll have the option to either record yourself, your screen, or both — this will depend on your content.

A good video by Udemy’s standard is:

For recording, Udemy mentions that many instructors use the following cameras:

For screencast recordings, Udemy suggests:

Udemy doesn’t mention a specific video editing software, so feel free to use the one you prefer.

Now, let's take a look at their audio standards.

If you want your students to have a pleasant learning experience, then having clear audio is non-negotiable.

Udemy has a list of microphones mostly used by their instructors:

You can use other microphones as long as they have good audio quality.

Udemy supports many audio formats, but MP3 and AAC provide the best upload experience.

Your delivery is how you present your content and how you speak during the recording process.

For optimal delivery, you have to:

Getting great delivery might take some practice, but don’t worry if you make mistakes.

You can always fix the errors in the editing process.

If your course covers these points, you’re good to upload it to Udemy’s platform.

You can upload your lectures individually or you can use Udemy’s Bulk Uploader.

Either way, follow these steps:

After uploading your course to the Udemy marketplace, you’ll need to fill out the course landing page template to make it easier to discover inside Udemy’s platform.

For that, you need:

After filling those details, submit it for review and Udemy’s team will either approve it or tell you what needs to be improved.

Once approved, you can start marketing your course.

If you’re new to selling courses on Udemy, you could look at the landing pages of the top courses to get an idea of how to properly distribute the keywords.

After optimizing your course landing page, you can improve your marketing efforts with:

Paid advertising is probably the easiest way, but it can quickly become expensive, so you’ll need a generous budget to invest in it if you plan to use it long term.

There are ways for you to get free traffic, but it takes time and involves building your brand outside of the Udemy platform.

However, with this method you can:

You can build a successful business and use Udemy as a medium to sell courses instead of on your own website.

If you can’t invest in advertising or you don’t have your own site, you can rely on the Udemy platform to do it for you, but its effectiveness will depend on how optimized your course landing page is.

There are some methods you can use to improve your course and make it stand out from the rest.

Let’s examine them below.

Even if your course checks all the boxes from the Udemy Learning Experience checklist, there are still ways to improve it:

Making your course’s content easier to consume will aid the learning process by complementing many of the points previously mentioned.

You can make your course more comprehensive by:

These methods are meant for every student, not just those that have some form of disability — which is what most people think when talking about accessibility.

Scripting your content will help you prepare a smooth delivery to make your course easier to understand.

How you script your course is up to you, but here are some best practices you can follow:

We recommend practicing reading your script out loud as if you were recording.

You don’t have to memorize it, but you should be able to recall the key points and keep a consistent tone throughout your lectures.

Most courses have practice activities to give students an opportunity to use their new knowledge and assessments to test their understanding of a topic.

For your practice activities, provide your students with:

Plan your assessments based on the topics you believe are the most important for your students to learn.

The most common types of assessments are:

You’ll also get a fully-stocked "launch kit" that will help you kickstart your course's initial launch.

Interested? Get a preview of the first video and get a taste of its content!

Now, let’s take a look at how much an Udemy instructor can make on the platform.

Before we get into how much you can earn on Udemy, you should know that to create paid courses you must become a premium instructor.

Otherwise, you can only upload free courses.

To do that, follow these steps:

Once approved you’ll be a qualified instructor.

It's not possible to say exactly how much you’ll earn, because it depends on:

If students enrolled in your class thanks to your marketing efforts, you’ll get 97% of the revenue, but if a student buys your course after clicking on a Udemy advertisement or from an Udemy search, you’ll only get 37%.

So, to make more money from being an Udemy instructor, you’ll have to promote your courses yourself.

Keep in mind that the revenue split from Udemy search results has changed many times in the past and has been gradually decreasing the earnings of course creators, so it’s possible that they’ll reduce it again in the future.

For these reasons, it’s not possible to tell you precisely how much you’ll earn on Udemy.

We can, however, offer you a better alternative where you can sell your courses and keep all the profits.

Our course creator makes it easy for complete beginners to create their first course.

To do it, follow these steps (you’ll need a systeme.io account):

And much more!

With all we have to offer and everything you have to gain, how much would it cost you?

Sign up for our Free plan to build, sell, and market your courses and upgrade to a paid plan once you’ve seen results.

We’ll be waiting for you!

Before we wrap this up, let’s answer some frequently asked questions about Udemy.

Udemy is a great platform to start selling your online courses, because you only need to upload them and the platform will take care of the marketing for you.

However, you won’t have control of the pricing and if you want to make a living selling courses on Udemy, you’ll need to do the marketing yourself.

This is because instructors are earning less every time there is a change in Udemy’s revenue share policies.

You also can’t build a brand in Udemy, because you can’t grow an email list, which is essential if you’re a serious educator/coach.

With systeme.io’s all-in-one tools, you can create your courses, build your brand, grow your email list, and market your products while keeping complete control over your courses’ pricing and earnings.

Also, you have the option to publish your course in our marketplace, build an army of affiliates, and set commission rates to get people interested in promoting your course.

Our Free plan gives you all the tools you need to get started and create your first course and you can upgrade to a paid plan after you’ve seen results.

Sign up and build a successful online course with systeme.io today!